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Second USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies (COOTS), 1996
A Measure of Testing Effort
John D McGregor and Satyaprasad Srinivas
Dept. of Computer Science
Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Abstract
Accurate estimates of the time and resources needed for a project are
difficult to achieve. Numerous metrics have been proposed and a few
have proved reliable in making these estimates. With the increased
emphasis on quality and testing, estimates of the amount of effort
required to test a product are a necessary part of any complete
project estimate.
Estimates of the effort to test object-oriented components and systems
are particularly important because these components are often added to
repositories to be used many times. The amount of effort required to
test the component is related to its complexity. We consider several
measures of method and class complexity and relate them to
testability.
The main focus of this research is to estimate the effort that is
needed to test a class, as early as possible in the development
process. We investigate the testability of a method in a class and
indirectly estimate the effort that is needed to test a class. We
define a concept termed the visibility component of a method. It is a
measure of the accessibility of the information that must be inspected
to evaluate the correctness of the execution of a method. We show that
the testability of the method is a function of its visiblity
component.
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